How to Eat Food & Consume Liquids
This week’s newsletter is an instructional lesson in how to eat food and consume liquids. Preferably at the same time for maximum enjoyment.
Right. Firstly, how the heck has it been over two weeks since the last newsletter? I draw your attention to this because, well I feel bad about it for those of you that choose to subscribe, and there’s some sort of expectation. For those of you that don’t subscribe, welcome, enjoy another free newsletter as sporadic as they may seem.
This week’s newsletter is an instructional lesson in how to eat food and consume liquids. Preferably at the same time for maximum enjoyment. Preferably specific foods and specific liquids chosen by specific consultants, in exchange for goods and/or services.
What I’m really talking about is wine and food pairings, coupled with the proliferation of nonsense by the people that are telling you precisely what to do on the internet.
Proper Technique
The internet has come down to not just suggesting food and wine pairings, but in an endless attempt to find lowest common denominator content, how to eat the food and drink the wine.
See also:
How to open a screw capped bottle of wine.
How to pour wine into a decanter.
The secret way to hold a fork properly.
I’ve seen recently, people actually eating the food on camera, all chewy and spoony, popping stuff in their gobs. Considered viable video content for wine influencer types. An instructional video on eating for maximum wine & food pleasure.
I think this is part of a wider broadening of wine ‘influence’ that the content required needs to be ‘accessible’.
I know as well as you do the most common phrase in every wine shop and tasting event ever held is: “I like wine but I don’t know much about it”.
If they must, most wine educators will start at the beginning, with simple flavour profiles of a range of foods and wine styles and go from there.
The ‘influencers’, in order to demystify this even further, have evolved backwards. Beginning with explaining when to chew the food, then when to pop the wine in your mouth, and physically how to swish them together.
I generally think that if a wine and a food go together, the scrollers of social media can figure out which order to do it. I’m also fairly confident that regular consumers of food have learnt to chew with their mouths closed so the wine doesn’t dribble down their chin.
Maybe practice at home before you do it in public if you haven’t yet.
Is This Unique to Wine?
In how many other industries do people need spoon feeding the instructions down to the most basic of human activities.
I’d love to see some beer-fluencers showing intrepid and overwhelmed, potential aficionados wondering how the heck to get into a can of Rivington Fog. Then completely skipping over what it tastes like, or who made it.
See Also;
Christmas gifts for beer lovers; ‘RingPull Magic Twister’
How long does a beer last once you’ve opened it?
How to swirl your pint for maximum froth.
Is there a Runner’s World Instagram undercurrent I don’t know about? The first steps in your running journey; How to put your shoes on like a pro. Cut to a close up of some hairy runners toes being squidged into a shoe, set to the latest trending audio.
See Also;
‘Bunny ears’ or ‘loop the loop’, Lacing up your first 10k.
Should you wear pants or boxers on a long run?
I think it’s possible to elevate, educate and engage with people who already have a passing interest in the subject. Create some engaging, considered advice, or just some actual down-to-earth hacks.
Otherwise give us some insight, some useful, actual tidbits to get the journey started for those on the cusp.
Insightful Advice
On a train journey, I once found a squashed up Kit-Kat in my rucksack, god knows how long it had been there. The chocolate was starting to seep out of the foil. I’d also bought myself a bottle of Fanta Lemon for the journey home. I’ll tell you now I ate that Kit-Kat, and not for a single second did I think I’d ‘paired’ it with the Fanta Lemon.
When people ask me “What food should I eat with this?”, it’s not because they genuinely want to have an experience of the two together, it’s because they’ve been told they should. Like asking your Uber driver if they’ve had a busy evening.
Another actual video I saw, went something like this.
“Need a quick, easy, cheap food & wine pairing? Well I can’t wait to share this one with you.”
“Head to your local supermarket and buy a £4 ready meal, then nip to the wine aisle and buy a £7 bottle of nondescript Italian white…”
“Get home, pop the shit food in the microwave, drink the shit bottle of wine and cry yourself to sleep”
Who is that helping? Anyone on the planet who has ever had a mindless glass of wine with a quick microwave dinner. I suspect they’ve done it without the audacity to consider the two ‘paired’ together.
With the abundance of wines and the array of foods available, there’s more potential combinations than a Rubik’s Cube. I can categorically tell you there is no way to complete ‘wine and food pairing’ with the same satisfaction of twisting a Rubick’s cube into its perfect state.
Meanwhile, vin-fluencers have capitalised on this by pushing the narrative that wine and food is a complex matrix of tannin and spice and acid, and that you can’t possibly figure it out on your own. You need some straight talking instructions.
The simplification comes full circle, as the content becomes more mundane.
Food and wine pairing becomes more about the intent. The considered consumption of drab food and dull wine, with no other purpose other than to not die of starvation while drifting through the shame slightly tipsily.
What’s The Purpose Anyway?
Full disclosure, and you probably know, I whack up videos on Instagram. That content is mostly for me, and a very, very small niche of people. I’m chill with that.
The level of ‘white noise’ on Instagram is astounding. I posted a video yesterday and I like to have very quiet background music. The ‘trending audio’ options included a long list of audio tracks with each attributed to 100,000’s of reels.
Think about that for a sec. Millions of reels, in the last few days, just from that subset using the same few songs.
There are over 500 million ‘daily active users’ on Instagram. Imagine if half of them posted a reel once a week for a year, that is billions of reels clogging up the internet.
Even with my UK-centric hat on, the stats say there are 35 million daily U.K reels watchers. If 0.01% of them watched your content that would be a reel with a reach of 350k unique viewers.
No matter how you look at it, it’s likely that actual audiences are tiny in the grander scheme of things.
A very good friend of mine knows too well that one of my mottos is “Nothing matters1“ because in essence everything is pointless.
Whether that be:
Trying to teach people how to eat.
Excitedly pairing food with tedious wine.
Watching reels on Instagram and getting grumpy about them.
Happy Sunday.
dk
Further Reading
Here’s how to write about wine and food with integrity and affection. I love everything about the way Jason writes.
Secondly, Tom Holt, winemaker at Paso-Primero, is a very down-to-earth guy. He has struck just the right balance, subtly undermining, half-serious series about pairing the wines he makes with various packets of shit crisps. The mighty Bacon Crispies (frazzles) with his aromatic Rosado is the pinnacle.
Early readers, and email receivers will have noticed a hilarious typo in that my motto is “Nothing Natters”. That is a typo I’m quite proud of.
Re the Tom Holt comment: At a recent tasting of Chardonnay from around the world we tasted an expensive Burgundy that to both my wife and I tasted of bacon. We both agreed that the ideal pairing would have been a packet of bacon frazzles.